When a user issues a query to a search engine, the search engine consults an index of web pages and their associated content to determine a list of relevant web pages to return to the user as search results. The search engine employs a variety of methods to generate the index of web pages including, for example, the use of web crawlers or spiders. The search engine further employs various methods for ranking or weighting the indexed web pages. The weighting aids in determining a placement order of the indexed web pages returned as search results.
One existing method for ranking or weighting the indexed web pages is to compare the contents of the web page with the uniform resource locator (URL) for that web page. A high correspondence between the contents of the web page and the terms or components of the URL results in high relevancy for the contents. Such existing methods product high relevancy for static URLs only, however, and fail to associate a high relevancy to web pages dynamically created via query strings in the URL. Dynamic web pages and associated URLs are generated based on an individual user's request for particular content.
Web sites that want to improve the search engine rankings for their web pages may then abandon dynamically generated content and create separate, static web pages for each possible user request for content. However, creating and maintaining these static web pages is time-consuming, expensive, and is not an optimal solution when managing very large websites.
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